Life of Automobile, The

by Parissien, Steven

  Almost 8.5 million Deux chevaux (including derivatives such as the Dyane and Ami) were made in France before production was halted in 1988.1 But the 2CV was not an instant hit. The car was at first heavily criticized – in print by the European motoring press, as well as on the stage by French comedy stars. In Britain, Autocar sniffed that the 2CV was ‘the work of a designer who has kissed the lash of austerity with almost masochistic fervour’, while Morris Motors insisted that their new Minor of 1948 was Europe’s most economical real car, implying that the 2CV barely qualified as such. Yet Citroën was flooded with orders and there was soon a three-year waiting list. Sales peaked in 1974 when the old campaigner was given a new lease of life by customers panicked by the oil crisis; as late as 1979 a new, thrifty version was introduced with a fuel-efficient 602 cc engine (providing a mere 29 bhp). Right-hand-drive 2CVs were produced under licence in England from 1953 to 1964. In 1960 Citroën even produced an ‘anglicized’ version, called the Bijou, which must rank as one of the ugliest cars ever sold. Britons, though, never rallied either to the Bijou or its 2CV cousin. In 1966 Citroën shut its Slough factory, which was subsequently bought by the American confectionery giant Mars who converted the plant to make Milky Ways and Twixes.

  The 2CV owed its timeless design to André Citroën’s gifted protégé, André Lefèbvre. Born in 1894 and trained as an aircraft designer, Lefèbvre joined the idiosyncratic pioneer car maker and aircraft manufacturer Gabriel Voisin after the First World War. During the Great Depression the market for Voisin’s hand-made luxury cars imploded, and Voisin generously offered his key designers, led by Lefèbvre, to Citroën. Here Lefèbvre established a reputation for innovation and eccentricity. Tall and debonair, he was rarely seen without his trademark glass of champagne, and usually dressed in a flying jacket and white silk scarf as if he were about to pilot one of Voisin’s planes into the skies. Yet Lefèbvre was no engineer, dismissing car engines as tournebroches (‘spits’), which merely served to dirty his sophisticated apparel. It was Boulanger who introduced the mechanical innovations to the 2CV, and who ensured that the car was frugal with fuel; Lefèbvre was there to lend it style and class.

  In 1955, Lefèbvre and Bertoni helped Citroën create one of the most innovative, daring and stylish cars of the twentieth century, the DS19. The ‘Goddess’ – déesse (‘DS’) is the French word for a female deity – instantly became one of the outstanding cars of all time. Its wraparound windscreen, sloping nose and wheel at each corner made it look like nothing else. The ‘thinking-man’s car’, and very much an engineer’s vehicle, it boasted a detachable glass-fibre roof; a large glasshouse, making the car seem light and airy; a single-spoke steering wheel; new radial-ply tyres from Michelin; high-pressure hydraulics; nitrogen springing; disc brakes at the front; revolutionary, quick-release wheels; and radial tyres, which offered far better performance and a far longer lifespan than their competitors.

  Most drivers, though, focused on the DS’s new pneumatic suspension – the stuff of dreams. It made the car wonderfully comfortable; the DS rose into the air when started, and sank gracefully on to its streamlined haunches when at rest. And it automatically adjusted the car to the road conditions, from the bumpiest country track to the smooth new autoroutes. It could keep the car running even if it was operating on only three of the wheels.

  Understandably, and in sharp contrast to the undemanding 2CV, the DS was a highly complex animal. Some French dealers actually terminated their relationship with Citroën after 1955, saying that the DS was too difficult to repair.1 But it was always worth trying. As the magazine Motor commented, the DS may have been ‘the most complicated car made anywhere in Europe’, but it was also ‘the most comfortable car made anywhere in the world’. As the champagne-coloured DS was revealed on the Citroën stand at 1955’s Paris Motor Show, scenes of near-hysteria broke out as everyone sought a closer look. Lefèbvre and Bertoni’s sinuous, aerodynamic lines gave the DS a timeless grace, light years removed from the chunky silhouettes of most contemporary European offerings. (The equally new Peugeot 403 on the adjacent stand – a boxy, Pininfarina-designed saloon – was completely upstaged by the DS, which made the Peugeot look hopelessly outdated.) By the end of the day Citroën had taken twelve thousand orders for this most exquisite of all motor cars. Two years later the vehicle was even entered as an exhibit at the International Exposition of Decorative Art in Milan, where it was shown suspended in the air with no wheels, like a spaceship.

  After 1958 the DS became the epitome of the assertive, francophone individualism of de Gaulle’s new Fifth Republic, helping to banish embarrassing memories of imperial decline and military retreat from the collective French memory. It became the default official car for President de Gaulle and his ministers (and star of the film of Frederick Forsyth’s tale of the plot to assassinate de Gaulle, The Day of the Jackal, in 1973). In 1958 independent coachbuilder Henri Chapron built a cabriolet version, and between 1962 and 1968 Bertoni updated the design, introducing quadrupled headlights behind glass covers. Citroën even introduced a luxury version, the DS21, and an estate variant, the Safari.

  While it had no answer to the DS, Renault’s recovery was almost as impressive as Citroën’s. Following Louis Renault’s death and the nationalization of the firm, Renault settled down to re-equipping its factories for civilian operation. Now that generous overtime payments were guaranteed by the government, the crippling strikes that had so plagued the company in the 1930s were a thing of the past and production soared. Equally significantly, the numerous administrations of the Fourth Republic ensured that the native car industry – or at least what remained of it by 1955 – was well protected by trade barriers. These were not raised until 1960; even then, the only model initially allowed into the country was the tiny Isetta bubble car, which had no equivalent in France.

  The Renault 4CV was the firm’s first postwar product. Unveiled in 1947, it had been quietly developed during the war; in 1946, as we have seen, the notorious Ferdinand Porsche was appropriated to work on its design. Clearly influenced by Porsche’s KdF-Wagen – the 4CV was rear-engined, like the VW, while its tail looked identical to that of the Beetle – the 4CV’s German ancestry was accidentally underlined when the first production models were painted in surplus sand-coloured paint which had originally been ordered for the vehicles of Rommel’s wartime Afrika Korps. Early 4CVs were accordingly nicknamed La Motte de Beurre, the ‘Lump of Butter’.

  The sturdy, cheap 4CV soon became France’s most popular car. It remained in production until 1961, although in 1956 it was officially replaced with the Dauphine. This racy, three-box design (front and rear ends were bolted on to a welded centre section) looked like a sports car but was actually a modest little family saloon which handled frighteningly badly at the high speeds its jet-age shape encouraged. Neither the Dauphine nor the 4CV ever challenged the export success of the Volkswagen.

  Citroën and Renault were not the only French car makers to prosper in the postwar years. Simca (an acronym which stood for the Société Industrielle de Mécanique et de Carrosserie Automobile) had been founded in Nanterre, to the west of Paris, by the Franco-Italian entrepreneur Henri Pigozzi in 1935 as a French arm of Fiat. In 1951 it launched the first model not based on a Fiat design, the Aronde, and three years later felt strong enough to absorb Ford’s nearby Poissy factory, which Dearborn was no longer interested in. As Ford retreated from France, however, Chrysler advanced. In 1958 Chrysler bought a 15 per cent stake in Simca, and five years later bought the controlling interest in the firm from Fiat. Chrysler’s purchase of the British Rootes Group the following year (which, incidentally, reunited the two halves of the venerable Talbot marque) laid the foundations for the ill-fated conglomerate that became known as Chrysler Europe. By 1981 the ailing combine had, ironically, axed the Simca name in favour of the rejuvenated Talbot brand.

  Postwar Italy was not the ideal market for the ambitious car maker. The Italian car industry had been ruined by retreating Germans and
advancing allies alike. And Italy was still a poor nation; in 1950 only one in every eighty-two Italians actually owned a car. Nevertheless, the Italian love of motor racing soon reasserted itself. This, combined with the Italians’ flair for design, and their inimitable gift for devising cheap, small cars, helped the major Italian auto makers to an enviably healthy position by 1955.

  The flagship manufacturer of Italian sports cars in the fifties was, as before 1940, Ferrari. Helped by its successes on the racetrack – Ferraris won the majority of Grand Prix and major rallies after 1950 – the firm carved out a unique niche in the global auto industry. The company’s founder, Enzo Ferrari, came from a humble background in Modena in northern Italy. Having fought in the First World War, and seen most of his family wiped out by the terrible influenza pandemic of 1918–19, he began work as a mechanic, joining Alfa Romeo in 1920. In 1923 Ferrari started racing Alfas, using (after 1932) the prancing horse symbol to adorn his cars.1 In 1933 Depression-hit Alfa withdrew their financial support for Ferrari’s team, but the indefatigable entrepreneur simply found an alternative patron in Pirelli, and continued to drive his ‘racered’ cars (red was the official Italian racing colour in the interwar years) for Alfa. When Italy entered the Second World War in 1940, Alfa found its plant confiscated by the government, but Ferrari’s factory was too small to be considered for government requisition. Nevertheless, as an enthusiastic fascist, Enzo Ferrari, forced to move his factory from Modena to the small town of Maranello in order to avoid allied bombing, willingly made machine tools and aircraft parts for Mussolini’s government, until Mussolini’s fall in 1943. Ferrari then miraculously shed his fascist past when the allies arrived – a situation at which both the allied military government and the US Army, fearing communist insurgency, were happy to connive. Ferrari was thus allowed to reform his company and to begin racing again in 1948. When the Formula 1 championship was introduced in 1950, Ferrari cars, driven by legendary figures such as Juan Fangio and John Surtees, proceeded to dominate the races of the ensuing decade, while also performing spectacularly well in endurance races such as the Mille Miglia and the Le Mans 24-hour contest.

  Enzo Ferrari only began to sell production road cars in order to fund his racing habit. The first Ferrari sports car, the 125S, was produced at Maranello in 1947. More influential, though, was the splendidly curvaceous and remarkably advanced 166 Inter of 1949, the company’s first successful assault on the Grand Touring market, a sector with which Ferrari has been closely associated ever since. In 1962 Ferrari followed the 166 with the company’s first supercar, and possibly the greatest Ferrari road car of all time, the 250 GTO. Today the GTO’s successors serve as the enduring global benchmark for high-performance sports cars.

  The cost of racing, however, finally proved too much for Enzo’s pockets – as well as those of his main backer, Italian tyre giant Pirelli. By the mid-1960s Ferrari was on the verge of bankruptcy, and in 1963 Ferrari and Pirelli offered Ford a stake in the company. Ford’s autocratic chairman, Henry Ford II, was delighted; but delight turned to fury when Enzo Ferrari, guessing that his independence would be seriously compromised once subsumed within the mighty Ford organization, had second thoughts and abruptly broke off negotiations. Henry Ford II retaliated to this public humiliation by launching a racing car division to challenge Ferrari.1 By 1965, now fighting off a series of hostile takeover bids by angry Ford managers, Ferrari turned to Fiat. It was Fiat that provided the essential financial security to enable Ferrari to resist Ford, and in 1969 the Torinese giant increased its stake in the company to 50 per cent.2 Thereafter, Ferrari prospered under the shelter of Fiat’s umbrella; indeed, it was soon joined there by other famous, sporty Italian marques such as Lancia, Maserati and Alfa Romeo itself. Today, Ferrari is effectively the racing arm of the Agnellis’ formidable empire.

  In 1946 control of Fiat passed, with the allies’ blessing, to the steely academic Dr Vittorio Valletta, who had been Agnelli’s CEO since 1939. This transition was achieved despite the fact that the communist-dominated Turin unions had demanded Valletta’s resignation on account of his complicity with Mussolini’s administration. Valletta’s avowed aim was to ‘regain our former ascendancy, to re-establish the prestige of Italian technology and to safeguard our jobs’. And this he duly did: between 1947 and 1956 production at Fiat rose tenfold and the car maker was restored to financial health.

  Not all of Fiat’s new models were successes. The Fiat 1400 of 1950 was too much of a compromise; its bulbous styling seemed to owe more to America than to Italy, and although its revolutionary unitary construction set the pattern for future Fiats, the conservative Fiat board would not allow the company’s experienced designer, Dante Giacosa, to install the engine he wanted, decreeing that a big power plant would make the car too potent and too expensive to run. The 1.4 litre engine they chose instead was far too feeble to make the overall package attractive, and the car was a flop.

  The Fiat 600, however, was an unqualified triumph. Giacosa introduced a new layout for the car, with the engine at the rear, as well as using the 1400’s pioneering unitary construction. Significantly, the Italian government seized on the 600’s launch in 1955 as a cause for national celebration, to mark ten years of reconstruction and redevelopment following the devastation and ignominy of 1945. The following year Giacosa adapted the 600 into yet another innovative new product, the Fiat Multipla. A six-seater miniature minibus which could carry a whole family, it was, in 198os’ parlance, the first multi-purpose vehicle (MPV), or people carrier. The engine was packed as far forward as it would go (an idea borrowed by the Mini three years later) and the front luggage compartment removed in order to accommodate three rows of paired seats. At the 1960 Rome Olympics, Multiplas, with their Tardis-like internal capacities, provided memorable transport for all of the event’s officials and athletes.

  In 1957 Giacosa produced his masterpiece. Reminding the motoring world of his classic Fiat 500 of 1936, he launched his brilliant, characterful Nuova 500, or Cinquecento. Over 3.6 million of these tiny, beautifully styled cars were built before production ended in 1975. Only 3 metres long and weighing less than 500 kg, the Cinquecento was originally powered by a diminutive 497cc engine, sited under the floor at the rear. But it proved practical, economical, and immensely popular. Many still survive today – although, as with all postwar Fiats, body rust soon grew to be a notorious problem. Fiat even made an estate version, surely one of the smallest station wagons ever to be mass-produced.

  Like Ferrari, Alfa Romeo also rebuilt its reputation after 1945 through success on the racetrack. In 1950 1.5 litre Alfa Alfettas (in truth a prewar design that had been updated and supercharged) came first, second and third in the world motor racing championship. Their second-placed driver was Juan Manuel Fangio, generally agreed to be the finest racing driver of all time.

  Alfa had been founded in Milan in 1910, but had gone bankrupt in 1928. It was rescued by Mussolini’s government, for which it made aircraft engines during the war, and only fully returned to civilian car production in 1954 when it launched the stylish, Loewy-influenced Giulietta twodoor coupé. Concentrating on sports and performance car production in the 1960s, Alfa was, like Ferrari, always precariously balanced on the brink of bankruptcy and in 1986 finally fell into the ever-welcoming arms of Fiat.

  Fiat was not the only great Italian success of the postwar era. Italy’s independent car designers were by 1950 in great demand by the auto manufacturers of Western Europe, and even by America’s Big Three. Mario Boano of Ghia in Turin worked not only for Alfa, Lancia, Ferrari and Turin’s own Fiat in the 1950s, but also for Chrysler and Renault, for whom he created the Dauphine. As we have seen, Battista Farina’s design consultancy Pininfarina, based just outside Turin at Cambiano, acted as design consultant for many British, French and American firms, and by the end of the 1950s had built a successful relationship with BMC. Perhaps the greatest stylist of them all, Giovanni Michelotti, worked with Standard-Triumph after 1958 and designed some of the cl
assic cars of the fifties and sixties, including Triumph’s Herald, Spitfire, TR4 and the marvellous Triumph 2000.

  In the immediate postwar period, the German car industry was in a sorry state. Most of the now-divided nation’s car plants, which since 1939 had largely been making tanks, guns, armoured cars or engines for Hitler’s war machine, were ruined. Machinery that was still intact in the east was often carted away by the Russians as war reparations. Few Germans were even allowed to drive; in 1946 only those whose jobs made driving essential were allowed by the military governments to use their cars. Nor, thanks to allied bombing and the devastation of the allies’ invasion, were there many cars actually available to native Germans. As historian Michael Sedgwick has noted: ‘Of the 40,897 private cars registered in Hamburg in 1938, only 7,147 had survived.’

  Many of the famous German plants of the 1930s were handed over to the Soviets in 1945. The most prestigious was BMW’s Saxon base at Eisenach in Thuringia, which continued to produce pre-war BMWs in small numbers until 1952, when the works was transferred to the new East German government and renamed EMW, or Eisenacher Motorenwerk. Four years later, the factory produced its first model under the new marque of Wartburg, a pioneer car maker of 1898–1904 and a brand that BMW had briefly resurrected in the 1930s. Eisenach’s Wartburg became one of the two staple cars of Soviet-controlled East Germany, alongside Zwickau’s Trabant. It continued to be powered by feeble two-stroke engines (fuelled by a mixture of petrol and oil) until shortly before the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, when Volkswagen assisted Wartburg in making its first four-stroke power plant. German reunification the following year spelled the end of the Wartburg car, which was not only hideously underpowered and dangerously polluting but also, thanks to its ancient production line, cost far more to make than equivalent Western models. The Wartburg factory was closed in 1991 and much of its workforce joined the new Opel factory that opened nearby the following year.